Faster transaction processing capacity is on the way through ‘sharding’

In near future, the world might be able to experience faster transaction processing through the Ethereum network. This will become a reality with the increased capacity of the network via the concept known as ‘sharding’. On 30th April 2018, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed through a Tweet this information on sharding.

Buterin’s Explanation on Sharding Mechanism

On 30th April Monday, Buterin provided the relevant details related to the proof of concept for the Sharding mechanism through a couple of Tweets and a Reddit post. He indicated that the “bag of ideas” for its development on Ethereum was “pretty well-established”. The process would utilize a proof-of-activity similar to “Proof of Activity: Extending Bitcoin’s Proof of Work via Proof of Stake”.

Sharding mechanism results in an increased number of transactions processed through a blockchain. This is an ‘on-chain’ design, which means several computers can do a transaction workload in a distributed manner among them. This allows to simultaneously do more tasks at the same time, increasing the completed workload.

According to Buterin’s suggestions, the shard blocks will take approximately ten seconds to process, given they are distributed among several computers. In his tweets on Monday, he mentioned the following;

I would not say the spec is finalized at this point, though the ‘bag of ideas’ is in my opinion pretty well-established. The latest research consists of combining together existing ideas about scaling and latency (i.e. block time) reduction.

Buterin further commented the following in his tweet;

The overriding principle is ‘get maximally close to equivalent properties to a single chain’. This includes optimistic confirmation via fork choice rules and traditional BFT finality through Casper-FFG cycles.

Developers of Ethereum cryptocurrency were looking at ways to have on-chain scaling improvements from a while back. This has given rise to competitiveness with fiat payment processors, including Visa.